With the trend to self-service marketing of food and grocery, personal care, hardware and other products, control and display of pricing has assumed increasing importance. From the consumer's point of view, it is necessary that he or she be fully and accurately informed of the price of an item selected, at the time of selection, and that the same price is charged at the checkout counter.
The merchant has even more compelling reasons to insure pricing consistency and accuracy at the shelves and at the checkout counter. He or she must satisfy the customers and maintain prices to keep pace with the competition and costs to insure a reasonable profit. The merchant must also comply with the laws pertaining to providing accurate price information to consumers.
The development and widespread use of modern point of sale (POS) terminals at checkout counters, while of obvious benefit in a number of ways to merchant and consumer, has served to focus on the shortcomings of price marking techniques. In commonly employed POS terminals a scanner scans a uniform product bar code, looks up the uniform product code in a database, and charges the corresponding price to the customer.
Until recently, products were either "item priced", i.e. each unit marked with its actual price by stamp or label, or "shelf priced", i.e. the price of a given item is shown by a printed label attached to the shelf adjacent to the item. In some retail settings each item is priced by both means. But both techniques are labor intensive and costly, as well as being subject to a variety of human errors. For example, in stores employing POS terminals with prices set by computer coupled to the terminal, it often occurs that the item or shelf price differs from the price charged at the POS terminal; this may be caused by mismarking, or by failure to update a POS price change at the shelf. A customer confronted with a different price at the POS terminal is understandably annoyed and adverse business or regulatory consequences may follow. Indeed, some states and localities impose penalties upon the event of a POS terminal charging a price differing from that marked on or near the product. Other states and localities require that in any establishment employing POS terminals there must be price information at or near the merchandise, and in some areas the permitted distance between product and price is quite small. In recent years, a number of efforts have been made to join the modern computerized POS system with shelf pricing systems, so that prices indicated at checkout counters are, with high reliability, identically indicated at the shelf at which the product is displayed.
Numerous systems have been proposed for displaying continuously updatable prices in retail stores. The benefits flowing from installation of a viable, workable system would be many. Prices could be displayed for each of the many products for sale, and the price, electronically displayed, could be made to match with high reliability the price generated when the product is scanned by a product code scanner. Sales could be posted, and later cleared, with a minimal labor cost as compared to the common manual method of physically marking and remarking the prices on sale items. Store-wide sales, whether tied to day of the week or other events of business importance, could be posted, and later cleared, almost as easily as sales on particular items.
Most proposed electronic pricing systems have suffered, however, from numerous drawbacks. The reliability of some systems has tended to be too low, and the cost too high. Among the most vexing problems is the failure of electronic display technologies to satisfy all the product price markings in a typical retail setting. Many proposed electronic pricing systems offer their intended benefits only if all or nearly all product locations are amenable to installation of electronic price display devices. But experience shows that existing proposed electronic pricing systems, without more, fail to provide their intended benefits where a substantial portion of the products for sale are inconsistent with electronic display devices. For example, some goods are displayed on tags such that no electronic price display device is mechanically compatible with the tags. Other goods cannot enjoy an electronic price display device because no shelf edge (the usual location for an electronic price display device) is nearby, sometimes because no shelf is used. Still other goods are in areas exposed to the elements where an electronic price display device would be damaged with time. Finally, some goods are in multiple locations in a retail store, only some of which are amenable to an electronic price display device, while others of the locations are amenable only to a printed price display, often due to the temporary nature of the location.
When the time comes to change a price, a retail store may post new printed prices that are printed off-site, such as at a central data processing site for the chain to which the retail store belongs. This induces substantial delays because the new printed prices must be physically delivered, and makes it difficult to synchronize the posting of the new printed price with the updating of the electronically displayed price.
It is known, of course, to attach local printers to price display systems, and systems have been proposed wherein the system could send characters to such a local printer to generate a printed price. But no known proposed system handles the complex tasks of coordinating the synchronization of electronic and printed price display changes, of accommodating the many shapes and sizes of printed prices that are desirably used in retail settings, and of queueing printing tasks so that generation of printed prices can be accomplished with only a minimum of user intervention.